BELGRADE: Ten years after the wars in the Balkans left a quarter of a million dead, reconciliation moves are still waiting for the 'truth' to come out first. "It often comes to who should be blamed more for war crimes," Croat historian Igor Graovac told IPS.

"It then transforms into the stand 'we are the innocent victims, while all the others are heinous criminals'. Then it turns into a political manipulation of the public." Graovac, who works at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, says "such an attitude amounts to a sin against victims themselves, as their deaths can be abused for sowing new seeds of hatred and death."

As years go by more and more voices are heard now that no lessons were learned from the deaths of mostly civilians in shelling or in massacres. In a word, war crimes. The cost in human lives for the creation of independent Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia was almost one percent of the population of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. People from all the warring nations - Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs - fell victim.

Only families and some experts seem to recognize that victims have been pushed aside as numbers. "Truth is constituted by multiple facts and perspectives, each of which is vulnerable to distortion, denial, rationalisation and refutation," chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Carla del Ponte told an international conference in Belgrade. "Almost nobody speaks about the victims and their rights to justice and fair trial."

Carla del Ponte told a conference on 'dealing with the past in ex-Yugoslavia, post-conflict strategies for truth, justice and reconciliation' that the problems continue in the minds of people and within judicial systems on all sides involved in the conflicts in former Yugoslavia (Bosnian, Croat and Serb).

Only some of the suspected perpetrators of war crimes are being prosecuted by the ICTY. Little has changed on the local scene to help deal with war crimes or to bring reconciliation.

"It is not a secret that hundreds, even thousands of perpetrators of serious war crimes are not even charged, often seen (by surviving victims) in the streets, still having official functions or important positions," del Ponte told journalists at the conference.

Foreign Minister of Serbia and Montenegro Vuk Draskovic told IPS that people are living in "merciless times", but that "there is no excuse for a merciless attitude towards victims."

Immediately after Oct 5, 2000, (when former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power), "we should have gone to Srebrenica (in Bosnia) and said: this is the scene of the worst crime ever committed against non-Serbs, but in the name of Serbs. Unfortunately, we did not do that."

Srebrenica is the site of worst atrocity after World War II in Europe. Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN protected enclave in July 1995, killing about 7,000 Muslim men and boys. Then commander of the Bosnian Serb army Gen Ratko Mladic stands accused of genocide before the ICTY. He is believed to be hiding in Serbia.

Serbs are deeply divided over the wars and over the role of Croatian and Bosnian Serbs. Many still believe they were only defending themselves, and had committed no war crimes. They consider the Srebrenica massacre an invention of Bosnian Muslims, or even a deserved punishment for war crimes committed by Muslims against Bosnian Serbs.

"It's a pity that the victims are being regarded only as numbers," Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch told IPS. "Such an attitude does not bring people together and does not open the way to deal with the problems of the past. Without such an effort, little can be done for the future."

Zoran Stankovic, head of the elite Military Medical Academy in Belgrade who has worked at many sites of massacres and atrocities during the war told the conference that "victims have no nationality. They're human beings, regardless of what nation they belong to."

His work, he said, "has only confirmed my stand that war is just a synonym for overall destruction, enormous suffering and slaughter of the innocent. When everything comes to an end, those who are the most responsible simply blame others or transfer the responsibility for war crimes to higher levels." -Dawn/IPS News Service.